My cruise photo.com

Getting close to cruise so I went to purchase photo but have a few questions

All digital photos=$249.95

All digital photos plus prints =$349.85

So for anyone who has purchase either of these packages pros & cons not sure which one to purchase. I am not very tech savvy so how difficult to get/view photos from digital process? Do they give you a CD?

Thanks

we went on the Dec 28 Eclipse 14 night cruise and purchased the unlimited digital + prints for $299.95 on the mycruisephotos.com website before we left. This was for our family 4 (staying in one cabin) so we thought that on our 14 night cruise, we should easily get our money's worth.

The unlimited digital package was not offered. Too bad, personally I would have preferred that.

Here is our experience:

You get a CD at the end of the cruise from the ship's photo gallery. The bad news is that the CD does not have the actual photo files on there. Instead you are supposed to load the software on the CD onto your personal computer and then it will download your photos thru the internet (presumably after you get home). Well our CD did not work. None of our PCs could run the .exe file on the CD. I contacted mycruisephotos.com by phone and they are transmitting a request to the Eclipse to mail us another disc. And so I am waiting for that right now.

The general procedure on board for working with the unlimited photo package was that every night or two, we would drop by the photo gallery to look at the photo prints--hard copies--placed on the wall (the old traditional way), find and retrieve our photos and give them to the ship's photo gallery employees to put in a large envelope that was used to collect all our prints during the cruise. The envelope was then given to you on the last evening of the cruise.

During the visits to the photo gallery, we would then go to one of the many photo kiosks that were there. You swipe your Celebrity Sea Pass card in the machine and it would bring up on the LCD screen all the pictures that it had on file up to that point in the cruise. The ship uses face recognition software to identify your digital photos and those are the ones that you saw on the kiosk. We could also see the same photos in our stateroom through the television although looking at the photos in our stateroom was not useful when you have to talk to the photo gallery people to make corrections (see next paragraph).

Now I will tell you that on our cruise, about 20% of our photos that we found on the wall did not have a corresponding digital print in the electronic kiosk. So we would have to flag that photo with a photo gallery employee and they would put in a request for the digital image of the photograph to be added to our account. Sometimes the opposite was true--we would see an electronic photo or two that we could not find the hard copy on the wall. The photo gallery people would be alerted to it and they would put a print request in.

All in all, it was a lot more work than I expected. Part of the reason is that when you get the unlimited package, you become very motivated to stop to have your photo taken. That in turn means that there are alot of photos to wade through each night (at least for 4 of us). On the other hand, at the end of our 14 night cruise, we had 111 photographs taken (less than $3 per photo)!!

One other thing to point out. mycruisephotos.com is a company located in Grand Cayman. So be sure to use a credit card that does not charge you a foreign transaction fee!

All in all, I was glad that we did it since, as a family, we rarely have professional photos taken of us. In other words, I felt we got our money's worth and then some! Of course I will be disappointed if they are not able to resolve my CD problem.....

we went on the Dec 28 Eclipse 14 night cruise and purchased the unlimited digital + prints for $299.95 on the mycruisephotos.com website before we left. This was for our family 4 (staying in one cabin) so we thought that on our 14 night cruise, we should easily get our money's worth.

 

The unlimited digital package was not offered. Too bad, personally I would have preferred that.

 

Here is our experience:

 

You get a CD at the end of the cruise from the ship's photo gallery. The bad news is that the CD does not have the actual photo files on there. Instead you are supposed to load the software on the CD onto your personal computer and then it will download your photos thru the internet (presumably after you get home). Well our CD did not work. None of our PCs could run the .exe file on the CD. I contacted mycruisephotos.com by phone and they are transmitting a request to the Eclipse to mail us another disc. And so I am waiting for that right now.

 

The general procedure on board for working with the unlimited photo package was that every night or two, we would drop by the photo gallery to look at the photo prints--hard copies--placed on the wall (the old traditional way), find and retrieve our photos and give them to the ship's photo gallery employees to put in a large envelope that was used to collect all our prints during the cruise. The envelope was then given to you on the last evening of the cruise.

 

During the visits to the photo gallery, we would then go to one of the many photo kiosks that were there. You swipe your Celebrity Sea Pass card in the machine and it would bring up on the LCD screen all the pictures that it had on file up to that point in the cruise. The ship uses face recognition software to identify your digital photos and those are the ones that you saw on the kiosk.

 

 

We could also see the same photos in our stateroom through the television although looking at the photos in our stateroom was not useful when you have to talk to the photo gallery people to make corrections (see next paragraph).

 

Now I will tell you that on our cruise, about 20% of our photos that we found on the wall did not have a corresponding digital print in the electronic kiosk. So we would have to flag that photo with a photo gallery employee and they would put

in a request for the digital image of the photograph to be added to our account. Sometimes the opposite was true--we would see an electronic photo or two that we could not find the hard copy on the wall. The photo gallery people would be alerted to it and they would put a print request in.

 

All in all, it was a lot more work than I expected. Part of the reason is that when you get the unlimited package, you become very motivated to stop to have your photo taken. That in turn means that there are alot of photos to wade through

each night (at least for 4 of us). On the other hand, at the end of our 14 night cruise, we had 111 photographs taken (less than $3 per photo)!!

 

One other thing to point out. mycruisephotos.com is a company located in Grand Cayman. So be sure to use a credit card that does not charge you a foreign transaction fee!

 

All in all, I was glad that we did it since, as a family, we rarely have professional

photos taken of us. In other words, I felt we got our money's worth and then some! Of course I will be disappointed if they are not able to resolve my CD problem.....

Thanks for your input, so much good information.

We are sailing in March and are thinking of buying the unlimited package with prints bi would love to hear if they resolve the cd issue.

We are traveling with my sister and her family in another cabin. They say that if you link the cabins you can get the second package for 50% off but can't find anywhere you can purchase that on-line. Do you have any info on that?

And finally, do you have a lot of opportunity for pictures and multiple poses. My wife loves to scrapbook and photo book and relies on lots and lots of photos.

Are the photographers high quality and professional? We went on a princess cruise last year and they took beautiful pictures of us. It was hard to chose which ones to take.

you can contact them by phone 1800 772 3470 M-F 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. EST

We are sailing in March and are thinking of buying the unlimited package with prints bi would love to hear if they resolve the cd issue.

 

We are traveling with my sister and her family in another cabin. They say that if you link the cabins you can get the second package for 50% off but can't find anywhere you can purchase that on-line. Do you have any info on that?

 

And finally, do you have a lot of opportunity for pictures and multiple poses. My wife loves to scrapbook and photo book and relies on lots and lots of photos.

 

Are the photographers high quality and professional? We went on a princess cruise last year and they took beautiful pictures of us. It was hard to chose which ones to take.

a couple of days ago, mycruisephotos.com sent me an email under my case file that the CD was going to be shipped from the Eclipse soon. I am assuming that it was sent out today as Eclipse was at Ft. Lauderdale today.

As far as getting the 50% discount for linking cabins, I agree with picture's response. You should call them directly to get a person to guide you through it.

Yes, there are lots of opportunities to get photos and many of those opportunities allow time for multiple poses:

1. During each evening, there are several photo stations set up at different public areas of the ship with different backgrounds. In fact the backgrounds on each evening are changed so that they are different each night (helps the photo gallery manage their picture inventory as certain backgrounds corresponds with certain dates). There is a pure white background that is absolutely awesome to take group photos--you can do novel poses like kneeling, sitting, laying, etc. At each station, the photographers insisted on taking photos with different family combinations: the whole family, parents only, kids only, father/son, mother/daughter, etc.

2. photographers roam the dining rooms during each formal night to take your picture at your table.

3. port photos. When you get off the ship at port, there are 2-3 stations set up for getting your picture: a. picture with a costumed employee (pirate, dolphin, etc). b. picture with an life preserver/ships wheel with port name on it. c. picture with the ship in the background (my favorite).

4. special events including embarkation. There is an evening when you can get your photo taken with the Captain.

During our 14 night cruise, we had a total of 111 photos taken!

I considered the photos to be of very high quality and the ship's photographers were excellent.

if your purchase all the photos no CD do you still get a release form???

I did not understand the question. If you buy all the prints with no CD, I doubt you get a release.

If you are talking about my particular situation--if they never get me a working CD--I suppose it depends on what type of monetary refund I get.

I received the CD today at my house via US Mail. The CD was mailed from St. Thomas--presumably when Eclipse docked there on Jan 22.

I had no problems loading the CD onto my PC. The main reason is because they simply burned the full resolution image files on the CD instead of making me run an .exe file on the 1st (non-working CD). There must be a business reason that they don't do this in the first place.

The number of photos sent was 111 which was the exact number I remember seeing when we were on board looking at all the photos on the kiosk at the photo gallery (in other words, I did not get shorted any photos).

Anyway, I was able to easily copy the files over to my PC. The only thing that I am missing is the official piece of paper (or file) giving me rights to the photos themselves (this supposedly was contained in the first CD).

So in the end, I am happy.

We did this on the Reflection last Nov, there was a link to the outside vender. Pre booked, it was less, $224. We got over 400 sheets and the CD. Kinda like a drink pkg, if they were taking a photo we did it.

There were times we had 6-8-10 people in our shots! From sail away, to our CC roll call group. We handed out extra copy's to friends the last day.

After emailing mycruisephotos.com, I received an email from them the next day that contained the release form that I was missing.

Here are the on-board offers for photo packages when we were on the Dec 28 2013 14 Night Eclipse cruise:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bwsk-dPJV5LqSmhvcDlDQmQ5cGM/edit

From what I saw, the 15% off coupon (for Select members in the Captains Club) coupled with the free prints offer, made the resulting price equal to the pre-cruise on-line offer of $249 for unlimited digital images + prints.

We did the full package with all photos and CD on our cruise we just returned from. It was $299 ordering in advance and would have been $450 on the ship. We had a blast posing for all the photos and were very pleased with the outcome.